Panorama9 sets up shop (sort of) in Bay Area

Allan Thorvaldsen, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded and sold his third startup, Softscan, to Symantec in 2009, is bringing his latest venture from Denmark to San Francisco. Or at least part of the operation.

Right now, he’s the only Bay Area-based employee for Panorama9 and will recruit sales and marketing people for this office. Hiring engineers here is just too expensive here, he said, in a recent interview. The bulk of the development team is in Denmark, with others in Russia, the Ukraine, and Lithuania.

Hiring, especially of engineers, is a blood sport in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Companies are paying bounties for top talent and smaller companies find it hard to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google.

Panorama9’s goal – and it’s a tough one — is to provide IT managers with a one-screen dashboard of all their on-premises and cloud-based assets.

The company incorporated last year in the United States because this is where the biggest customer opportunity lies, he said. “The U.S. is one to two years ahead of Europe in the cloud and most of the players in infrastructure and IT service management are U.S. based. Those are all the companies we want to integrate with,” he noted.